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Thursday, January 22, 2009

GoGrid Sucks! If You Value Your Sanity - Do Not Use Them!

Yesterday was not a good day. We received a message from GoGrid that our server was about to be rebooted. When it came back up, the filesystem was corrupted. What's this mean? It means our server was a useless pile of transistors. But that really wasn't the beginning or the end of it.

A month ago when our server was rebooted, our filesystem had a few files missing. We filed a ticket and went back and forth with GoGrid support. They kept pushing the blame back at us. This was the final correspondence we had when they decided to close the case, even though, as you can see, we weren't prepared to close it. My comments are in red, GoGrid's in blue. I was pretty sure this wasn't our problem:

I was quite surprised when they admitted to me on the phone yesterday that they have had sporadic read only issues with their servers - thus, the problem we experienced back in November was their fault. Well that's nice. They took responsibility for their inaction. Would have been nice a month ago.

Today they again took fault for the corruption issue. But this is where it gets really out of hand. They knew that there were potential issues with their hardware. These issues had the potential to cause server corruption. Yet they decided not to notify their customers or to implement a backup strategy for their customers. Instead, as Raj (one of their VP's) explained to me on the phone today, they didn't reach their threshold of the number of customers who may have been impacted, so they didn't notify us. I chided him for that. What an utterly absurd notion. If there is ANY potential impact to ANY of your client's data, you have a responsibility to notify your customers. This isn't rocket science. It's damn common sense. Even their support staff told me they couldn't believe that management decided to withhold this information. Who the hell is running the show there?

What is the result of all of this? Well, I can't code right now because our SVN server was lost, so we have no code repo. I can't build our server because they're in the middle of upgrading hardware on our node that's "supposed" to fix this issue. And I don't quite have our strategy figured out because Fajar is probably sleeping somewhere in Jakarta. And I want to run everything through him - since he is our CTO.

It's putting us back a few days to say the least. As you can imagine, we are looking to alternative hosting services. They gave us a $400 credit. I asked for the next 6 months, at least, free. I'm not sure what it would take to feel confident in their service. But I do know, if I were you, I wouldn't put anything up in GoGrid's cloud. Beta my ass... this isn't close to a beta.

@Andrew - We're doing our research too. I'll post in a few days when we make our choice. Here's what we're thinking about though - a Rails hosting company. EngineYard is too expensive, but gets rave reviews. Joyent used to be great but has been getting mediocre reviews as of late - for not innovating. We're also looking into Slicehost among others - but they were bought by Mosso - so there should be an interesting integration, for Rails at least. Will keep you posted and you do the same.

You might want to check out RimuHosting: http://rimuhosting.com/rails-hosting

I use them for my backup server and they've been It looks like they support Rails hosting too. They had some problems with their routers a year ago, but other than that, they've been pretty reliable and their support is A+.

@Sebastian - Don't do it. I'm having continued problems with them. But since I still have credit on my account there and I'm not out of Beta, I'm sticking with them until I need to start paying again. There's incredibly server lag on our servers too... so it's not isolated to just the issues mentioned in my post.

Been using them for 10 months now, they're just the worst thing out there but they're cheap so my company won't switch elsewhere. I swear their servers are sitting under someone's desk in India. I actually got an answering machine when I called support one day. STAY AWAY! Setup hyper v on a server by yourself and save your money.

Did you have multiple servers setup using their free load balancing? How did you protect your server and your data? Did you perform any backups? I don't see how a server going down means a company sucks. Seems to me you should have used multiple servers if your business is that important.

@Anonymous - to the last anonymous poster. You don't see how a server going down means a company sucks? You don't see how a company not notifying its customers that there was the potential for their server to crash is an obligation? You don't see how they didn't feel obligated to back up our data when they KNEW of this problem? You think the burden lies on us - to pay for additional servers to protect us from a crappy product? Yea...good comment.

GoGrid lost one of our servers too. I had to open a ticket with them to find out why I could no longer RDP.

No service credit, no real apology.

Date: 8/11/2009Subject: GoGrid > Server offline unexpectedly

Dear Customer,

I've spoken with a few engineers in the Systems department about your issue. As is, the virtual server operating system has been corrupted and cannot be recovered, which means that the virtual server image cannot be recovered or started, I'm sorry.

As stated yesterday, the hard drive has been attached to another server on your account, but there is no guarantee that all the data on that drive is intact, since the virtual machine was corrupted.

Regards,

System AdministratorGoGrid Support

Date: 8/10/2009 Subject: GoGrid > Server offline unexpectedly

Dear User,

I've made the contents of the server '*****' with ip nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn available on your network via SAMBA share. The details are below:

\\nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn\recoveryuser: ********

There is no password to access this share as it is accessible only within your network. Feel free to recover whatever files you are able to copy at your will. Delete the server when you've copied what you can.

we're using AWS, the services are slightly better (using a totally non-scientific google check 'aws sucks' versus 'gogrid sucks'--and from experience..) and cheaper compared to GOGRID but am also looking for alternatives now, thanks for this post I can safely tick off GOGRID from the list of possible options as well.

I can't agree more. The "managed" part of the whole thing is a joke. The support team doesn't know anything about anything. They just keep bouncing tickets back until you give up. A dedicated server takes up to two days to setup which is slower than ordering one from Dell and collocating it yourself.

I was happy with EC2 but it's too expensive.

I'm stuck with them for another couple of months. After that I'm going to buy my own server and collocate it. They don't do anything to justify having a "managed cloud" title.

GoGrid performs better than most of the other providers according to cloudharmony.com . They have dedicated team support, which is awesome, but you have to actually call them West Coast US business day. Their 24/7 is basic support, and you should get to know their dedicated teams (and this is for free). They have their issues, and they shouldn't be written off, as they have been making great improvements in their infrastructure and service. I've been quite happy with them, actually... I wouldn't put too much credence in reviews of a Beta system from 18 months ago. My 2 cents...

This post/thread originated Thursday, January 22, 2009 . That is a significant amount of time in the web industry. Have you found much maturation in the Cloud Hosting sector in the ensuing 18 months? The promises these companies make continue to be attractive, if only they would deliver. GoGrid is not out of business, so they must be workable to some extent...

Personally, we've had gogrid for 6 months. The VMs work fine, and they do support Windows 2008 (no R2 yet - I'm sure they're not too keen on the lessened memory requirements of R2). Their 'F5' load balancers are the worst thing ever. They go down weekly. No straight answers either. Oh, and they charge separately now for a hardware firewall. I've maintained F5's in the past, the things are bulletproof, unless you're completely inept about networking, which i fear is the case at gogrid.

I've been with Gogrid for a year or so, and they do suck :) but they are cheap. it's ok for testing but back up your own data regularly, because they do kill servers randomly. The best host anywhere is Rackspace but they are pricey.

Aug 31, 7 AM. GoGrid's internal network in California has been down since 2:30 AM. This is the third week in a row that they have had an hours-long overnight network outage. Support has been a bit more forthcoming than usual, but that's about the only bright spot in this cloudy morning.

Just writing to re-affirm the general opinion here. gogrid is a terrible company with incompetent people, very lax security practices and a very unreliable network. The worst part is billing, where I think an untrained monkey could do a better job at understanding and resolving my questions.

I say this with oodles of experience with gogrid. Unfortunately I got stuck with some long term servepath (same company) dedicated server contracts so gogrid was the only option to connect those to the cloud. A couple years later and none of the problems have been resolved, despite the almost daily (not exaggerating) automated survey email. I used to fill them out but after 3 years and zero feedback consideration, they obviously ignore the surveys.

Try EC2 or Rackspace, both 100X better in every way (based on my own experience with many instances each).

GoGrid just grabbed $500 from me even though I barely ever used the service. I had actually like the service when I used the trial offer, but I couldn't afford it. The salesperson who called me gave me the impression he would cancel the account, but then didn't do it. A few days ago I found a $250 charge in my checking account. When I called to complain they said they would "investigate it" and said I had to shut down my account myself. It would have been nice to know that sooner. But then it gets worse. I cancelled the account, then the next day they'd taken another $250 from my account! I've had to scramble to keep checks from bouncing. Yes, I know now that I should have given a real credit card number so I could dispute the charge, but I've never actually had this problem with a company before. I also know now that I will never use GoGrid and will tell all my tech friends not to use it either.

OMG!!!!!!!!! GOGRID sucks!! I just got off the phone with them after being told I could not increase the cloud server i have with them by 10gb. Although in a previous email (see below) their tech stated it WAS POSSIBLE! So, which is it? They ended the call by saying I could image the current server and "spin up" a new cloud server and copy the settings to the new server. GREAT! that will only take me like 3 days!Thanks GoGrid for sucking so bad at everything you do! I will be pulling the plug on these morons very very shortly. They will eat big for a day but never last a lifetime! They SUCK!Original Email from their support:

"Thank you for contacting GoGrid Support. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, but cloud servers hard drives remain the same size when first deployed and are not scalable without bringing the Server down temporarily. Saving an image of the VM will allow you to re-deploy the Server with more hard drive space (By scaling the RAM higher than what is already there), please note this will change your Servers settings and also temporarily shut down the server while the save processes. A relaunch of the Server with a higher RAM will scale the Hard Drive.

The other alternatives we suggest are to either launch a new VM and copy data over the Private Network, or copy data over to the Cloud Storage which scales depending on the amount of data stored. This will allow you to transfer your Servers settings as well.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any further questions or concerns I can assist with."